What's Wrong with Corruption? Messages from Confessions in China

This seminar related to the speaker's article which is primarily based on contextualized discourse analysis of confessions from 119 convicted party cadres on corruption charges in China.

The article made two arguments. First, these confession texts are propaganda that signals the government’s strength to punish outliers. Second, using such a warning to deter corruption is subject to an escalating scale of corruption given social pressure for success and peer learning among grafters. The article contributes to the scholarship of corruption by suggesting possible mechanisms of endogenous reproduction of corruption within the officialdom. It also presents confession as a new type of information communication among political elites for studies of authoritarian regimes.

Juan Wang is an Associate Professor of political science at McGill University, Canada. Her research has primarily focused on local governance and state-society relations in China. Her work has appeared in the China Quarterly, Journal of East Asian Studies, Asian Journal of Law and Society, Modern China, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Chinese Political Science, as well as Crime, Law and Social Change. Her first book, entitled, The Sinews of State Power: The Rise and Demise of the Cohesive Local State in Rural China was published by Oxford University Press (New York) in 2017.